Rav Dhaliwal on B2B Customer Engagement

We're really excited to bring you Episode 3 of The inSide Scoop: inSided's podcast bringing you the latest in customer success, customer engagement and user communities. This week we spoke to Rav Dhaliwal to get his unique take on B2B customer engagement.

So, grab a cup of coffee and give it a listen. For those who prefer to read rather than listen, you’ll find a transcript of our conversation here too.

Hello and welcome to The inSide Scoop, brought to you by inSided. inSided builds customer success community platforms that drive customer engagement, product feedback and ideation and customer self service. The inSide Scoop aims to bring you the latest in thought leadership and industry insights around customer success, as well as everything you could possibly want to know about online communities.

Dani Juson (00:39):

Welcome to Episode Three of The inSide Scoop, brought to you by inSided. I'm really stoked about the guest I'm going to introduce to you today. We are having a conversation with Rav Dhaliwal. Some of you may be familiar with Rav. He's something of a Titan in the customer success industry. He's pretty active over on LinkedIn, so do be sure to check that out and connect with him there. I will leave a link for you guys in the show notes. Rav has held a number of executive positions in various enterprise software companies over the last 20 years. Most recently he was at Slack, where he was the first UK employee and responsible for establishing the London office, and he also founded the global Customer Success team over there at Slack. So you could say he's no stranger to hyper-growth startups! He also built and led post-sales business units at Zendesk as well as at Yammer, which was later acquired by Microsoft. Rav's published several books on Enterprise Software deployment and he's a regular public speaker. Rav's now an angel investor. He specializes in advising the portfolios of venture and growth equity backed firms on how they can best develop their go to market and post-sales strategy and operations. So grab a coffee and let's get started.

Dani Juson (02:08):

Today we are going to be chatting with Rav a little bit about the topic of B2B customer engagement; particularly thinking about the overlooked power of peer-to-peer learning and just discussing why this is particularly relevant for our customer success teams right now. So really excited for this one. Welcome Rav. Great to have you here.

Rav Dhaliwal (02:28):

Thank you so much, yeah, it's great to be here.

Dani Juson (02:30):

Thanks for joining us. So before we dive in, how are you doing today? How are you doing at the moment in these still-challenging times?

Rav Dhaliwal (02:40):

Oh, well thanks for asking, Dani. Oh yeah. Really good. Thank you. Happy, healthy. I'm feeling very sort of fortunate to have everyone that I know safe and sound and, and I hope everyone listening is also well and safe too.

Dani Juson (02:56):

Yeah, absolutely. No, we echo that. Fingers crossed people are adjusting to the new normal, but it definitely takes a little bit of adaptability, doesn't it? So before I start asking you some of these questions that I'm excited to get your thoughts on, can you perhaps just give our listeners a little bit of background on yourself and you know, what makes you a great person for us to talk to here today about B2B customer engagement?

Rav Dhaliwal (03:20):

Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean in terms of whether I'm a great person, we'll obviously leave that to yourself and your listeners to decide! I mean, I've been in the enterprise software business for about the last 20 or so years. And so I've seen a lot of changes and trends, but I think that the running theme in my experience has been very much around collaboration and productivity type technologies, whether they're being used internally in an organization or externally with the customers and clients. And I think that that theme through a number of companies that I've worked for in a number of roles I've had, I think it's sort of particularly relevant to some of the challenges Customer Success seems to have in general. But especially at the moment. And the kind of things that I've been focused on over the last 10, 12 years is now how do you use these kinds of technologies to effectively engage and onboard and nurture your clients? Because ultimately, you know, you want them to be successful so they can grow, you know; so they can be a customer with you forever.

Dani Juson (04:27):

Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic. Well, thanks for being here. So you've got some quite some years of experience with B2B SaaS, you know, customer success teams. So maybe you can just pinpoint for us some of the toughest challenges that you've seen these teams face. You know, when it comes to creating engagement with their customer base from themselves, from the company, but also, you know, amongst their customer base on a peer-to-peer basis?

Rav Dhaliwal (04:55):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s a whole load of challenges that Customer Success teams face on a daily basis. They stem from internal challenges of alignment or people actually understanding what the team does and doesn't do. One that I feel like is particularly relevant in all sorts of companies in all sorts of segments. And the way I would describe the—what I see as one of the key challenges—is with the phrase: you as a CS team or as a vendor, you get paid to live and breathe your product. That's what you do. But your customer doesn't! Your customer has a day job. And essentially I think one of the major challenges that CS teams in particular face is that you are competing for your customers’ time, for their resources, for their mindshare—you're competing with their day job really. And on top of that, you're competing with a whole other bunch of SaaS vendors that are also trying to do the same as you, right?! Getting their product or service higher up in their customers' priority as well. So I think that's one of the key challenges all teams—I think no matter how big or small really—face.

Dani Juson (06:09):

That's a really interesting one. I've actually never really thought about it from that perspective before. And that just goes to show, goes to almost prove your point, really, doesn't it?! We live and breathe our product and it's really sometimes difficult to remember that the customer doesn't.

Rav Dhaliwal (06:24):

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And I think, you know, we want to engage with our customers, we want to get to know them, we want to understand what their goals are, hopefully to have some goals—but that's not always the case as well. I'm actually going to be writing a Medium post around that subject soon. But you know, the typical thing you'll do is you’ll email out, you know, try to have calls, meetings. Obviously, hopefully we'll all get back to face-to-face meetings sooner rather than later. But you know, if that's quite high friction, that's quite a big ask for a lot of customers. You know, they're typically very time-poor, they're resource constrained and they're even more so now in many cases, you know, there are a lot of businesses hugely disrupted. And getting that ability to engage with them, you know, on Zoom calls, on phone calls, you know, it can be tough.

Dani Juson (07:20):

And I mean would you say that, with regards to getting that, that attention really, is there anything that customer success teams can think about doing a little bit differently to perhaps almost stand out from the crowd when it comes to all these other competing priorities that customers might have?

Rav Dhaliwal (07:42):

Yeah a couple of things. I think one of the ways to think about it, and this may sound a little odd, and hopefully I'll be able to clarify, is one of the big parts of what CS teams are trying to do is to try to nurture and grow and educate customers, right? They're trying to help them to understand: How does my product and service help you now? How else can it help you? What's the best way of using it? Is it a real focus on teaching the customer? And I think the thing that I've come to learn is that there's actually quite a big difference between teaching and learning. And what I mean by that is teaching is very instructor centric. It's about the person who's telling you things. Whereas learning is actually very student centric. And I think one of the things that CS teams can actually maybe rethink about doing is: How can I actually create more conditions now for the customer to learn?

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Rav Dhaliwal (08:38):

Because some of that learning can be prompted by you. Some of it can be guided themselves. And I think a really big part of learning, and this is something I'm consistently surprised about how overlooked it is (and you touched on this in your introduction) is the power of peer-to-peer learning. So one of the things I think Customer Success teams can do now, is realizing: “Actually, if I can tap into the knowledge of my existing customers and create conditions for my existing customers to learn from their peers, that's an incredibly powerful way to not only engage them, but to help them to learn and to nurture and grow them.” And, you guys at inSided know this very well. I mean, that's the power of community, right?

Rav Dhaliwal (09:28):

So ideally, you know, communities would have a physical manifestation; that's not always possible. So if you could move that online, if you can create conditions where your customers are able to not just engage with you in a low friction way but with each other, and if you can prompt and nurture that engagement, there's all sorts of advantages for that. Not just in terms of how you onboard or nurture them; way more than just: How do I get to a lot of customers at scale? It has huge benefits for customers and for you—your product teams are going to love it because that iteration that they're constantly doing on the product is, you know—the engine for that iteration is feedback. And if you can get patterns and feedback in a really efficient way by having your customers all in the same place, that's super powerful.

Rav Dhaliwal (10:21):

And certainly from my experience, one thing that I've seen again, which I'm always really surprised isn’t used as more of a lever: Having that community of peer-to-peer learning is an amazing sales tool. You know, if you're talking to potential customers and you say, “Hey look, we've got this great product, not only have we proved how it will help you, we're going to give you access to our amazing CS team, these experts. Oh, by the way, you're also getting access to this sort of living, evolving community of hundreds of people who are all going on or have been on the same journey as you.” And so what that does from a sales perspective is it helps the customer or prospect to realize: “Well, actually the risk in me moving forward with this purchase is much lower because of the—potentially hundreds of—other people I'm going to have access to that have been through this journey as well.”

It is a sales tool. It can even, surprisingly, help as a recruitment tool. I mean in the past where I've managed teams where we've really doubled down on engaging with customers through online channels and synchronous online channels like communities—you know, that's typically where you're spotting the champions, and if you think about what you're trying to do with it a champion of your customers, you're really trying to turn them into a mini customer success manager. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to identify and empower and educate and nurture those champions that are your customers, so they're like a force multiplier for your Customer Success team. Well, eventually, you know, those people could even make incredibly good customer success managers. You know, it's not uncommon to hire at some point from your customer base because they're typically the people who are most passionate and vocal and advocate for your product.

Dani Juson (12:42):

Absolutely. And you know, that is such a fantastic point, and as you mentioned that, I can already think of more than one example that we actually even have here at inSided, where we've indeed done that. You know, we have people on the team at inSided that that have come from the customer base because they genuinely have been so engaged with the product and a large proportion of that has really stemmed from our own customer community that we run.

Rav Dhaliwal (13:08):

And I bet if you guys went back and looked at the data and correlated, you know, the usage patterns of those customers; where you pull those people from... I would imagine that it's probably very high, like the sophistication in product adoption.

Dani Juson (13:24):

Yeah, indeed. I mean, I don't have the data in front of me, but from my first thought, I can already tell that you're absolutely right with that point. Yeah.

Rav Dhaliwal (13:33):

Yeah. I mean, I'm someone who's, you know, I think anyone who's worked with me will probably tell you I'm largely obsessed with efficiency. You know, even extending to my personal life, I'm always thinking about what's the most efficient way of giving an X or Y. And I think now more so than ever where it's tougher to get people on the phone. It is tougher to get that mindshare. People are now adjusting to trying to work a full day and look after a family; many maybe not even having a proper office space. So getting on calls is really tough. If you can provide them an efficient way to get the information and the learning they need, but also to get access to people—that's a huge benefit. And I think it's something the teams that I'm seeing doing it now—understanding that actually this is something we haven't thought about before, but this is really powerful—you can see that they're going to make this part of the way they engage so it's going to be part of their success motion, it’s going to be this style of engagement.

Dani Juson (14:39):

Yeah, no, that's fantastic. And I mean, you know, you mentioned efficiency there and I think you're absolutely right. You're creating efficiency for your customers of course. But you're also helping your own customer success team with their own efficiency when you do enable this peer-to-peer learning.

Rav Dhaliwal (14:57):

And I think what's often been misconstrued, certainly during my time of being in software is, “Oh, well these kinds of tools are really good for scale or tech touch, right? Where we can't put a person on them [the account].” And that is true; they're excellent for that. But my experience has been that they actually work for all segments of customers. If you've got a giant seven figure customer they're going to benefit from it as much as someone who's maybe paying you a thousand dollars a month. And it's interesting because the learnings that maybe larger customers share in an online setting are just as valuable and just as applicable as maybe your smaller customers. So I think it's important to realize that all segments of customers benefit from this and all sizes of Customer Success teams benefit too.

Dani Juson (15:50):

Yes, definitely. You mentioned tech touch there, and I think that's an interesting one for us to just dive a bit deeper into. I've heard you mention this idea of synchronous versus asynchronous tech touch. Maybe you can just explain to our listeners a little bit about what your thinking is around that?

Rav Dhaliwal (16:06):

Well, I must've been getting a bit technical there! Fundamentally, I think it's just that most of our typical ways to engage with customers are one-way: You know, we typically send emails, we send newsletters. And I'm not knocking these—these are effective, that’s why people do them! But if you contextualize that with what most people's inboxes look like on a given day… and especially now—I don't know about you Dani—but it's just full of emails from every single business I've ever done business with!

Dani Juson (16:38):

Absolutely. I can relate to that!

Rav Dhaliwal (16:42):

So the synchronous nature of that I think is less effective in times like these, but it also doesn't give you a mechanism for feedback. People don't respond back to newsletters. A blast message goes out and typically you can't even reply to it. So if you have some form of synchronous communication, which is really, you know, akin to an ongoing dialogue, it's much more low-effort for all parties. I can dip into a conversation online, consume from it what I need, ask a question, come back a day later. So there's synchronous and asynchronous elements I'm not required to be on all the time, but it's a much more interactive medium and it's a much more useful medium for sharing and learning. So if you think about a new employee, someone who comes on board at inSided, they have a huge advantage, right? Because they can come to your internal community and they’ve got all the history of every conversation and every question that's been asked, right? If your customer is relying on a synchronous method of my email, someone that emailed me back, they're missing out on all the wisdom from the hundreds of other customers at the same question or similar questions.

Dani Juson (18:00):

That's so true. Yeah.

Rav Dhaliwal (18:02):

If you have a mechanism to communicate synchronously not only do you get access to all that information—and in real time—it's just a lot less friction. “Oh, I’ll go ask a quick question or I'll do a quick search”. Really powerful.

Dani Juson (18:18):

Indeed. And, you know, it's not even just that two-way dialogue that enables you as a vendor to get the customer feedback. But it's also that multi-way dialogue, you know, that really just kind of opens up a whole host of doors and opportunities for that learning that we talked about—for customers to help them ultimately achieve more success. So thank you for explaining that.

Rav Dhaliwal (18:42):

And the most beautiful thing I've seen is where, you know, you've got your CSMs in an online community, you've got your customers in there, and a new customer posts a question… And what happens is either another customer answers it before you even get a chance or one of your CSMs says: “I know the answer to that question, but I know that there's another customer that's got a really innovative solution for that. Let me just loop them into the conversation. Let's hear from them.” That's really powerful in reinforcing the value that you're adding.

Dani Juson (19:16):

You're absolutely right. And we see, with our customer base, absolutely our most successful customers are the customers that are managing and running their communities in that way. It's not about having all the answers as a customer success team necessarily. It's just about facilitating the progress. Right? And as you say, if you can lean on your existing customer base to do that, not only are you creating efficiency for yourself, you're also creating more engagement amongst your customers and it just feels like a win-win all around really.

Rav Dhaliwal (19:54):

Absolutely. And I mean there's nothing stopping you as a CS team from having structured approaches there. I've seen some teams have office hours, for example, in a community or have technical groups which are staffed by very specific types of engineers, for example. So there's a whole load of flexibility that you can do it. And certainly from my time at companies like Zendesk–customer service oriented companies—all the research, all the data shows that customers will always opt for self-serve as a first option if they can get it. It’s clearly a way people like to actually work.

Dani Juson (20:40):

I think that's a really good point. I'm glad you brought that up. So, we've mentioned, briefly, the elephant in the room! The situation that we are all facing right now, but I'm really curious to get your thoughts—at the risk of sounding like a broken record—I'm just really curious to get your thoughts about what customer success teams ought to be doing in terms of maybe being a bit more flexible right now. Are you recommending people review the way they're working with contracts, contract extensions? Maybe the way that they're looking at customer health scoring? What's different about the approach that's required at the moment and, I'm curious to know, do you think that that's something that we potentially are going to hold onto in the future? Could this potentially be more of an overall step change?

Rav Dhaliwal (21:38):

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think I’ll probably just tackle the second part of that first: which is that I think that definitely some things will change and they'll permanently change... the extent of that change, I think, will be very highly correlated with how long the current pandemic situation goes on for. I guess there's two schools of thought. One: If it goes on for long enough, it will maybe result in some sort of structural change in how businesses work. Or the other school of thought is: We'll get back to a hyper-normal state and... it's probably going to be somewhere in the middle, I would imagine. I feel very fortunate because with the kind of work I do now as an investor, I get access to a whole breadth of companies doing all sorts of different things at different stages.

Rav Dhaliwal (22:27):

So, from the super early stages to the very mature. And I think overall, from a flexibility point of view, I don't think it's just CS teams. I think businesses as a whole need to have a lot more flexibility at the moment. And one thing that I've been encouraging the portfolio companies that I work with to do is have your toolkit of options for customers ready to go. Don't try and deal with them on a case-by-case basis. Some of your customers are gonna need to talk about pricing, some of them about payment terms—potentially payment holidays. It's far better for you as an organization to spend some time internally coordinating and deciding: “What's our toolkit? What can we offer? And under which circumstances, what are the edge cases, what's the process?”

Rav Dhaliwal (23:17):

Because if you're going to have to deal with each of those one-by-one as a unique situation, it's going to be a really bad experience for you and for your customers. So, just overall from a business flexibility perspective that's super important. From a Customer Success team perspective, some of the things that I've been working with people on, and some of the things that I've been hearing from them: Really taking a lot of consideration around how they're engaging. So in some cases it's about dialing down the type of engagement versus dialing it up. Right? And what that means is actually what we need to do for certain types of customers is not do the email outreach—it's the WhatsApp message or it's the community post or it's a phone call, you know... so identifying the channel, the audience, the relevance of the communication or the timing of it is I think an area where there's probably a little bit more flexibility and rethinking that might be needed. And I think all of that stems from starting to segment your customers by their risk profile, because obviously different industries in different geographies are currently impacted differently. From a company level and a CS level, that's where I see a lot of the flexibility being needed.

Dani Juson (24:38):

Yeah. That's interesting. You mentioned relevance and that's the point that really kind of stands out for me there, with regards to the risk profiles—I think we’re perhaps all a little calmer now—but certainly maybe a month ago, I know I was seeing a bit of a flustered approach. With relevance kind of going out of the window when it came to customer engagement, and there was this feeling of: “We need to reach out, we need to let our customers know that we're here to help them and we need to give them options... We need to do this, we need to do that! We need to speak to them, see how they're doing!”

Dani Juson (25:16):

But as you say it's really important to just take stock of the relevance of that communication before we do that. Because depending on the risk profile yeah, sure—in some cases that may be exactly what you need to do—but in other cases, your best bet may be to dial it down a little bit for now. And of course it's always important to make sure that your customers understand that you're there for them, should they need you. But as you mentioned earlier, we're all battling with a hell of a lot more inputs; digital inputs. So kind of trying not to add to the noise in some cases is probably the best way forward.

Rav Dhaliwal (25:56):

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it's perfectly natural to do that in response to an almost overnight, very dramatic change. And as you rightly point out, there is a period of adjustment—people are still adjusting of course—but that initial shock, maybe it has passed a little bit. And I think that does provide an opportunity to think about channels; relevant tools. I'll give you a really good example: One of the companies that I'm working with is a legal tech firm. You know, they've got a whole host of new features they're rolling out, et cetera. But, what they realized is that while we could just share all of that information with all of our customers right now, actually, the most relevant thing that we can share with them is a use case for—they do contract analysis, right?—so, well, we could really share with them right now are use cases around force majeure clauses... really what lawyers are having to deal with right now! They looked at the way they're communicating, the way they're engaging, and thought actually that is probably the most relevant thing we can share right now. And maybe we'll change the cadence and the channel for the roadmap stuff and do that slightly later or slightly differently. And I think that's a really good example of a team being super flexible about engaging with their customer.

Dani Juson (27:13):

Yeah. Yeah. And with relevance. Absolutely as the key priority, so that’s a great job right now. So, kudos! So we talked a bit about relevance and we've talked about how tech touch and high touch, multi-way communication can be appropriate in different circumstances and how you can blend those approaches together. But I'm also curious to get your thoughts about creating what we call ‘sticky’ customer engagement experiences. So maybe you could talk us through, maybe you have some piece of advice that stands out to you—that perhaps you've given teams in the past or perhaps you're thinking about right now—that teams can really use to help them create these sticky customer experiences? What kinds of things go through your mind?

Rav Dhaliwal (28:05):

Well, I think it's a great question Dani. I think that it touches on a lot of the stuff we've already spoken about, but I would kind of wrap it all up and say that the thing I would advise is to really lead with empathy. Empathy is a really great starting point. So just some things like remembering my customers are probably really time and resource constrained; more so than ever. Can I rethink or be flexible about the channel I'm going to communicate in or the timing of that communication? All that stuff can make a huge effort. And can I actually think of newer, creative ways to help them become stickier? And that goes back to that teaching versus learning. Can we give them an online space where they can learn at their pace or learn from their peers?

Rav Dhaliwal (28:50):

I think those are some of the things I would definitely be encouraging in terms of advice. But outside of that: Just making sure that as a team you use this as an opportunity to really double down on—if you don't have it—getting your data, getting your signals; from usage characteristics and spending time analyzing those so you know when it makes sense to proactively reach out so you're not just waiting for something to happen. Right? So I think too often CS teams are at the mercy of having to try and find data from 15 different sources and contextualize it themselves. So there is a little bit of breathing room now—it's a really good opportunity to try and consolidate all of that and work with your ops people and your internal people to make sure those data and signals are coming at you and you're using those to prioritize outreach and style of outreach.

Dani Juson (29:42):

Yeah, that makes total sense. I mean obviously you've got a whole roster of awesome companies in your background. But maybe some of our listeners are coming from smaller, more early-stage vendors. Do you feel like there are any significant differences in how teams can approach creating customer engagement? You know, if they're a small team? Maybe when you're just starting out, and you have one or two people versus an enterprise customer success team?

Rav Dhaliwal (30:24):

It goes back to something we touched on earlier, which is that a lot of these approaches, a lot of things like using community, et cetera, they really apply to teams of any size at any kind of stage—because what they have in common is this idea of tapping into peer-to-peer learning, but also providing really low friction ways to engage or consume content. So I think that they're advantageous regardless of the team size. If you're a smaller organization, I think you actually have an opportunity to really double down on these kinds of approaches now, because there's just less coordination required internally to get stuff like this up and running.

Dani Juson (31:04):

That's very true. And I guess it comes back to the point you made earlier around creating that efficiency as well. You know, if you are able, as you said; if you do have that breathing room right now to create some of these toolkits, your strategies, then all you're doing is giving yourself a leg up when it comes to efficiency later on, as you scale, right?

So, I have a couple of what we wanted to call ‘lightning round’ questions for you! I'm gonna put you on the spot—although to be honest, I'm looking at the questions right now and I'm thinking, “Oh, you know, how lightning quick are these going to be?!” But I'm really curious: Obviously you've got this CS background, but I'm really curious to understand some of your insights around the work you've been doing in investments. So I'd just love to get a little bit of background from you on some of the things you are coming up against there. So let's start. The first question I have for you is: If you just have one piece of quick advice for really early stage SaaS companies that are starting right now, today, what would it be?

Rav Dhaliwal (32:18):

Well! A lot of the portfolio companies I work with are still at that very early stage. I would say my advice would be to assume there's going to be either no or very little sales for the remainder of the year. A little bit scary! But I think planning for that scenario makes a lot of sense. And by planning: Essentially work on very sensible ways to extend your cash runway for 18, 24 months if you can. And obviously, try and find the right balance between things that you can pull back on or delay—there may have been certain hires that you think "Well actually I can push those out for the moment", or certain kind of capital expenditure which you could maybe rethink—and try and build yourself a sensible 18 to 24 month runway if you can.

Rav Dhaliwal (33:11):

That's definitely a couple of things I’ve been working on a lot with early stage companies. And then the other one is what we talked about earlier, which is that toolkit: How can we sit down and actually look at your current customer base and do some risk rating based on their industry and how they’re impacted? And then what can we think about in terms of value-add that we can offer them to really help them be successful and let them know that we're here to support them.

Dani Juson (33:42):

Are there any initial tools that you would suggest or recommend, you know, to early stage startups that are trying to figure out how to do this effectively? You know, if they're a bit of a rabbit caught in the headlights right now?

Rav Dhaliwal (33:59):

I mean, I think the truth is that most businesses, especially in the early stage, are run off spreadsheets really, aren't they? And you know, that’s kind of understandable! But from a tooling perspective, things like, online communities—obviously you guys know that space; that's your space—I'm looking at those sort of lower friction channels. Looking at things that aggregate data for you. I talked about payment signals. I think those are all tools to really consider right now, because the data and signal stuff will actually help you efficiently prioritize, but things like online communities help you to efficiently engage. And to create a reinforcing wheel of learning and stickiness. So those are the sort of tools that definitely stand out to me at the moment that people can and are adopting.

Dani Juson (34:53):

So finding some initial, low-risk way to facilitate that peer-to-peer discussion and learning?

Rav Dhaliwal (35:05):

Have that space to have people come together online; that's super powerful.

Dani Juson (35:12):

Awesome. Okay, so question two: What skill do you believe is absolutely vital that CS team start improving and building on today?

Rav Dhaliwal (35:27):

Wow, fantastic question. The one that immediately leaps out to me, and I don't think this is necessarily particularly unique to Customer Success teams; it's something I talk to founders a great deal about: That's change management skills. Now I think change management is often typically misunderstood or thought to be, "Oh that's training." But actually change management is a whole discipline about understanding what it takes to drive behavior change. So if you think about what you're doing as a B2B SaaS business: You're selling a product, you're helping people with use cases, with technology—but what you're really doing is you're introducing some kind of change into their business. And that change is, by and large, a challenge for people to grapple with, especially now where we're dealing with huge amounts of change in a very short space of time. So having skills that actually help you understand how to absorb, adapt, and manage change—I think is a really key skill for everyone in business. Especially CS teams—because that's the business they're in—they're in the business of managing some kind of change.

Dani Juson (36:36):

That is a really interesting perspective. I've actually never considered it that way before. And I think that's a really fascinating perspective.

Rav Dhaliwal (36:46):

Well, I had this conversation with Robin, your founder and CEO: As the CEO, really what you're doing every day is just trying to manage constant change. And if you're doing that as a B2B SaaS vendor, imagine what your customers are doing! So if you can actually come to the table with skills to say, I have a framework for how we can introduce our product and how we can help you adapt your behavior that's not just beneficial to you, that's massively beneficial to your customer—because they're like: “I have a day job! So anything that you can do to help, it's really gonna add a ton of value."

Dani Juson (37:28):

I love that! Thanks Rav. Okay, so let's go a little bit more personal now if that's alright with you? Tell me the best educational resource that you'd recommend, personally, for learning about Customer Success?

Rav Dhaliwal (37:45):

Wow. Okay. Well, just following on from the change management thing that we spoke about there, it's a little bit of a dry textbook, but it's certainly a really fascinating read… there's a book called The Effective Change Manager’s Handbook, which really delves into the psychology and behavior have changed. So there are many, many books on that subject that talk about the practicality and the implementations. They're all great, but if you're somebody like me and you're actually interested in the psychology behind things, that's a terrific read I think. Not just for working in CS, but I think for your personal and career development, you know, people hoping to get into management or executive ranks one day. It's a really useful insight. And I have to, from an educational perspective, give a shout out to two gentlemen, Dan and Alex, who are the creators and the hosts of the Creating Customer Success Podcast. I was very honored to be—I think—the first person that they interviewed and they have created a series, I think they're onto 15 or 16 episodes now, of talking to success leaders and practitioners and it's incredibly insightful and incredibly useful. So some great learning there. So definitely I would encourage any of the Customer Success practitioners listening to check it out.

Dani Juson (38:58):

Those sound like two very good recommendations. I'll make sure that we link those for listeners in the show notes so they can check them out. Thanks Rav. Okay, penultimate question: What is your absolute favorite tool? You mentioned how much of an efficiency aficionado you are! What is your favorite tool? What's the one you cannot live without?

Rav Dhaliwal (39:18):

Well, that's easy. That's coffee!

Dani Juson (39:21):

Haha, okay!

Rav Dhaliwal (39:22):

That has always been the key efficiency driver! But seriously, Slack and Zoom for example—they've always been indispensable. I think they've just taken on even more importance now from an engagement and efficiency point of view and actually, just pleasurable user experience! I think I could not live without either. I'd probably pick those two over coffee if I was forced.

Dani Juson (39:51):

Wow! Okay. That’s good to know. Finally: Can you tell me a brand, a business or maybe even a team that you—on a personal level—just really admire what they're doing?

Rav Dhaliwal (40:07):

What an interesting question. I mean, obviously the two I mentioned before, Slack and Zoom both great brands, and you know, Eric and Stewart are terrific leaders that I personally really admire. But interestingly my passion in life is cinema, I’m a huge cinephile so I'm actually going to pick a non-tech brand. I may not necessarily like all their movies, but I really admire a brand called Blumhouse Pictures. So they're the makers of 'Get Out', 'Upgrade', 'Us', 'The Invisible Man'—they just make super intelligent genre movies. They're entertaining, they're very creative director friendly. And I have to confess, with my investor hat on, they do all of that on very modest budgets with huge outsized returns. So as an investor we love that kind of ratio! So not only do I actually admire it for it's creativity but for its business savvy as well!

Dani Juson (41:16):

No, that's the perfect combination. Really interesting too, to learn a little bit more about you as well because you've shared so many insights with us. Thank you for sharing.

Rav Dhaliwal (41:31):

There is actually a lot more overlap between Silicon Valley and Hollywood that you might imagine. Yeah. In terms of the way some of the investment firms work; they typically have been modeled on some of the Hollywood talent agencies. You know, this whole idea of being a full-service agency or full-service venture fund comes from Hollywood. It comes from a very famous guy in Hollywood called Mike Ovitz. So if anyone is interested in reading a little bit more about that, there's a book he wrote called: ‘Who is Michael Ovitz?' and he left Hollywood and actually went to Silicon Valley and he became an investor and he is now an advisor to Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of the most well known VC firms in the world. So in a weird way I've landed in a job which actually owes quite a large debt to my personal interests and passions.

Dani Juson (42:28):

That's funny. Oh, I'm going to check that book out. That sounds really interesting. I'll link it also for listeners if they're curious to find out a bit more about that.

Rav Dhaliwal (42:39):

Yeah. Fantastic.

Dani Juson (42:41):

Thanks Rav. I really appreciate you taking the time out to talk to us at inSided today. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Rav Dhaliwal (42:47):

My pleasure. And thank you again, Dani. I hope it's been useful and I hope everybody who's listening is safe, healthy and well.

Dani Juson (42:55):

Yeah, absolutely. And hopefully we will get the opportunity to speak to you again soon, but thank you so much for sharing, hopefully it won't be long now and we'll all be able to have some in-person meetings again soon. Thanks Rav! Take care.